Google, driving the getaway car for online bandits?

The head of the MPAA compares Google to the "getaway car" driver at a bank …

Remember the days when Google was the business "started by two guys in a garage" that was repeatedly held up as the example of Internet innovation and American can-do engineering? Those days are long gone. The newest rhetorical picture of Google paints the company more like the getaway driver for a group of snatch-and-grab thugs.

"How do you justify a search engine providing for someone to go and steal something?" said Dodd. "A guy that drives the getaway car didn't rob the bank necessarily, but they got you to the bank and they got you out of it, so they are accessories in my view."

Congress gets in on the action

But it's not just the MPAA that has the knives out for Google. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the lead sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, used his most recent hearing on the issue to rip into the company.

Another one of the companies represented here today has sought to obstruct the Committee’s consideration of bipartisan legislation.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise given that Google just settled a federal criminal investigation into the company’s active promotion of rogue websites that pushed illegal prescription and counterfeit drugs on American consumers.

In announcing a half billion dollar forfeiture of illegal profits, the U.S. Attorney, Peter Neronha, who led the investigation stated, “Suffice it to say that this is not two or three rogue employees at the customer service level doing this… This was a corporate decision to engage in this conduct.”

Over several years, Google ignored repeated warnings from the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy and the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University that the company was violating federal law...

Given Google’s record, their objection to authorizing a court to order a search engine to not steer consumers to foreign rogue sites is more easily understood.

"Unfortunately, there are some critics of this legislation who are not serious about helping to protect America’s intellectual property," he wrote. "That’s because they’ve made large profits by working with and promoting rogue sites to US consumers. Google recently paid a half billion dollars to settle a criminal case because of the search-engine giant’s active promotion of rogue foreign pharmacies that sold counterfeit and illegal drugs to US patients. Their opposition to this legislation is self-serving since they profit from doing business with rogue sites."

No longer warm and cuddly

A good deal of this Google hate is certainly self-inflicted. One has only to understand the sheer scale of Google's data collection and advertising efforts to be a bit creeped out by some of its behavior, while missteps like Google Buzz and overzealous collection of WiFi data in Google's Street View cars made things worse. And of course Smith is correct that Google was dinged $500 million for its support of online Canadian pharmacies, to which it provided customer support and assistance with "optimizing their AdWords advertisements," as the Department of Justice put it in August.

But Google is also a large and complex company, and attributing simple (or even single) motives to the company's actions is unlikely to produce much insight. For instance, the company's engineering DNA is algorithms that work at scale with minimal manual manipulation. The company also has at least some resistance to censorship, (eventually) pulling out of mainland China and making worldwide government requests for its information public. Both factors could incline corporate leadership to oppose approaches like those found in SOPA.

Still, it's easier (and a lot more fun) to compare the company to the getaway driver at a bank robbery—not that Dodd was doing this when he appeared at Google as a presidential candidate in 2007, of course. Google's blog post about that visit describes it this way:

As [Dodd] put it, Google's commitment to the free flow of information and powerful, speech-enabling technology provides the foundation for "a transformative power both vast and unprecedented—the capability to not only transform society but the very notion of society. Of community. Of democracy." At the same time, he challenged Google to do more to defend free expression and privacy both in the U.S. and abroad, directly questioning our decision to operate in Internet-restricting countries like China.

Dodd's rhetoric today may be as over-the-top as it was in 2007, though in the other direction. But Hollywood has long suspected Google of being more than a "passive conduit" through which bad actors push their wares. The industry points to things like a 2006 affidavit (PDF) from one of the men behind pirate sites like thedownloadplace.com, which originally used Google's automated tools to advertise its sites. But as the spending ramped up—the site spent $800,000 on Google ads over the course of a few years—Google "assigned employees to be our personal account representatives."

A Google employee spoke to the site operators by phone and e-mail and "expressed familiarity with our business and the content of our websites." Google offered them "optimization" services that suggested combining popular artists like Usher with the word "download" in advertising. Google also allegedly proposed that they use phrases like "Download Unlimited Top Software" (one site trafficked in warez).

"Virtually all" of the sites' business came from Google, earning the pirates $1.1 million in revenue, most of which appears to have been spent on more ads.

Hollywood has a clear suspicion that Google's behavior around issues of piracy is akin to its behavior on Canadian online pharmacies. Judging from the way Google was tubthumped by Smith and other Representatives at the most recent SOPA hearing, this line of argument already seems to be poisoning the negotiations around online piracy.

For its part, Google rejects such accusations. The affidavit mentioned above details behavior from 2003-2004, but Google isn't the same company it was back then. After its YouTube acquisition, it famously agreed to help Hollywood police the site, offering an automated content protection that it says required 50,000 engineering hours and $30 million to build, according to Google. It also says it has tightened up policies for its advertising account reps and that it bans AdSense from appearing on copyright infringing sites. "In 2010, we took action on our own initiative against nearly 12,000 sites for violating this policy," said Google counsel Katherine Oyama (PDF) at the recent SOPA hearing. "Already in 2011, we have taken action against 12,000 more. We also respond swiftly when notified."

Whatever the truth of the situation, the recent Google rhetoric reminds us of just how many enemies the one-time tech darling has accrued in its relentless march to Web dominance.